Earlier this month I was back at William Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, to speak about my book Lineage and the history of genealogy in early America at Swem Library. It was so much fun to be back on a campus and among friends and colleagues who have meant so much to me. But of course I also took a little time to do research in Special Collections. And I paused to appreciate this lovely portrait,…
When I make a list of issues I care most about as a historian, footnotes are at the top. Footnoting (this is not an invitation to debate the comparative virtues of endnotes versus footnotes, or whether publishers who want authors to bury their notes are right or wrong) is a traditional practice with critical value for an age awash in information mush (or worse). Footnotes are a contract between…
Coverture is a legal principle in which a married woman's legal identity and capacity is subsumed under her husband's. The post Coverture, Now More than Ever appeared first on Karin Wulf .
It s beyond fun to get to talk with you about Lineage, about how genealogy works and about your own experiences. Since Lineage was published I ve had the pleasure of talking with Liz Covart for the best history podcast, in my biased-but-that-doesn t-make-it-wrong opinion, Ben Franklin s World, and recorded a couple more including another favorite, Drafting the Past with Kate Carpenter. You can…
Making connections in the eighteenth century was often about making family connections. This is a story about an eighteenth-century account that reveals how ambitions of one kind could be understood through genealogy, and how information about family connections was shared among friends and family. It was the summer of 1775, almost exactly 250 years ago. But first, I have to note how much I m…
Every item on the cover is special but, as I ve noted before, often the aesthetic pleasures of the objects can mask the pain or violence of a family experience. Such is the case with this wonderful sampler, a family record worked by Laura Goodale when she was a teenager, and later submitted as genealogical evidence in her mother s application to receive a veteran s widow s pension. Laura s father,…
This extraordinary piece is both one of the originating points of my research for Lineage and also one of the most surprising things I found in my last rounds of research for the book. How can it be both? Well, to start there are two versions of this family tree, located across the ocean from one another. I had just added a tidbit about the extended Lloyd family earlier this year, after a…
I took this picture of Sintha Peck s gravestone in Old Ashford Cemetery in Ashford, Connecticut, on a chilly winter s day a couple of years ago. Cemeteries are remarkable places, and I m particularly drawn to those that memorialize early Americans in eighteenth-century spaces. In the nineteenth century American cemeteries expanded, became larger and even designed (think Mount Auburn), moving away…
Regular readers will know that a challenge/ joy of working on my new book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America is that I cannot seem to stop the research. Since I finished the book, which to be clear took a long time, I ve continued to amass material but also to extend and deepen some of the arguments and perspectives developed there. Such is the case with my work on…
I ve been rotating counter-clockwise from the top left to highlight the individual items that makes up the cover of Lineage, so we re now at this compelling watercolor family record that s in the lower left. The Craft Family watercolor family record is in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is a beautiful piece, though haunting in its stark recognition of how death shaped…